Join the Community! Creating your account only takes a few minutes.

Our exchange server is hosted on a windows server 2003, we have two DC's on windows server 2012.

The majority of our employees use outlook 2010 for mail, and for some reason auto-archive is set to disabled on all the computers in our network , but NOT through a group policy (One of my predecessors removed the GPO i assume, but have no way of confirming)

I'm trying to set it so that the default policy is that auto-archive is enabled for all users on our domain, because our inbox sizes have gotten silly.

So i went through the instructions, installed the outlook 2010 GPO and set the policy as in the screen shot. For some reason even if i run a gpupdate /force on a client computer, they still have access to their "Auto-archive" setting, and it's still set to disabled as shown in the second screenshot.

15 Replies

I'm going to come at this from a different angle and suggest that you NOT enable auto-archiving in Outlook for your users. Have you ever gotten a panicked call from a user about a "very important email that's gone missing and I NEED IT NOW!!!"? Then had to go on a wild-goose-chase, looking for PSTs on the user's workstation, mapping them then patiently explaining to them how it works, only to have the same thing happen again the following week with the same user? Or someone's hard disk dies, wiping out their PSTs that contained 9+ years of sales contacts and business agreements (not to mention the wedding pictures emailed by Aunt Mabel that nobody in the family bothered to save to disk).

There's likely a reason archiving was enabled by the previous sysadmin. I'd suggest that you start training your users in the lost art of keeping their mailboxes clean. If things need to be kept for compliance or CYA reasons, look into a proper email archiving solution. Worst case, you can show users how to manually create a PST, perhaps on a network share (not recommended by Microsoft, I know), then make it clear to them the limitations of saving emails in PSTs.

I appreciate the fact that it's just easier to enable auto-archive and forget about it, but you're setting yourself up for potentially serious problems if you do it without considering the circumstances.

I understand your concern, but we're a very small company, and i regularly back up the important computers anyway, so i'm not concerned about data loss.

The main reason i'm enabling this is because let's just say some of our users are somewhat computer illiterate, and their inbox's have swelled to up to 12 GB each, because they don't understand what "delete emails you don't need" means, no matter how many times I have tried explaining it to them. They also love to send 5mb+ attachments back and forth to one another for minor edits, which means their average email convo can end up being about 200 MB on its own.

If you've determined that the risks are acceptable, then let's proceed :)

Can you do a gpresult on the machines, and see if the new GPO is making it to that computer and that it is enabled? Syntax from a commant prompt: gpresult /H gpreport.html

This will create a file called gpreport.html, and you can open it and look at the status of the GPOs on the machine. It will at least pinpoint whether the Group Policy changes you made are taking effect.

Just one question for you: You mentioned that auto-archive is set to disabled on the workstations, but that there is currently no GPO for that. If you manually change the settings for a user, then reboot, do the changes stick, or do they revert? I'm trying to see if there may be another setting somewhere (local policy, some weird script, who knows...) that's forcing an override of your GPO settings.

Well, when i manually change the settings to enable auto-archive, and restart it sticks on the setting i set. But they still have access to the tab and can disable it if they want (which i don't want them to be able to do, assuming i give up and just change the settings manually, which i really don't want to do with a new batch of computers coming in)

I just want to echo what Gabrielle said. I can almost guarantee you will reverse this decision within a month, you will lose someone's archive at some point. Why not rely on quotas instead, it's a much safer alternative to have them delete their mail whether than having auto archive do it for them.

With that said...

Isn't there also a GPO setting for Disable File Archive that would need to be set to disabled to prevent them from turning it off?

I'm currently investigating this as well. It looks like the GPO only affects MS Outlook default AutoArchive settings. It does not actually apply said settings until the user clicks the "Apply these settings to all folders now" button. Sigh.

Move Post

Read these next...

We are an SMB with a lot of in-house-developed applications in Visual Basic. One of our programmers is leaving on short notice. I'm the network guy and I have little experience coding, but I would like to learn so I can understand and modify code as needed.

Can I just convert an existing Windows 7 install into a VM using VMware Converter and plug it into an ESXi install? And since the original physical install was done with an OEM disc, would the licensing still be valid?